OSX 2D game engine

Question

Are there any other OSX game engines out there similar to Torque from Garage Games? I looked into Torque awhile back but the current version 2D version hasn't been updated in a long time and there are a lot of known bugs that the company has said it will not fix. I has asked about Torque2D (the new engine) but was told it wont be out for an undetermined amount of time. Its unfortunate but their website lists Torque2D but actually its their old product Torque Game Builder.

I've tried Unity but at this point I dont want to do 3D, I'm looking for a nice 2D engine that you can just start a game in. Impact looks interesting, but I'm looking for a little more mature of a project (builtin networking) and I think I would rather end up with native applications rather than web based. I'm not looking for things like Ogre or LÖVE where you are given a framework and not a whole game engine and environment to built it in.

I would like to be able to target multiple platforms if possible and have multi-player support as well, not that multi-player is the only thing I'm looking for feature wise. the game engine itself over a game framework is much more important. I am willing to pay money for a nice product with good support.

Answer 1

Are there any other OSX game engines out there similar to Torque from Garage Games?

I'm afraid not, if you're looking for fully-featured game engines (which already include things like gamestate management, physics, scripting, pathfinding, editors etc.).

I've done some research into this in the recent past myself, since I was contemplating writing my own engine instead of an open-source-engine, but I found that fully-featured 2D game engines, which can really call themselves game engines as opposed to graphics engines with a couple of extra features, are extremely rare, I might even say non-existent.

There are a couple of libraries that provide some comfort features beyond just the ability of drawing textured rectangles (such as tilemaps, particle systems etc.), for example, Haaf's Game Engine (which recently was ported to Linux and OSX systems, but probably nothing with the complete functionality that you are looking for.

But if the most important thing for you is networking, and you're willing to go the hard route, SFML (and it's Mac port) provides some decently high-level networking functionality, as well as an excellent API overall with fairly high-level features in the areas of graphics (most notably the support of fragment shaders and in the near future vertex shaders, which sadly is something that a lot of 2D engines leave out), audio, input and networking.

Answer 2

There's GameSalad.

Create games for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HTML5. No coding required. Did we mention it's free?

But, it looks like there is no coding.

No coding. Ever. GameSalad aims to open the doors of game design to anyone who wants to create. With GameSalad's complete set of tools and editors, bring your game to market faster and easier than with any other development platform; and without coding a single line. That's development in days and weeks - not months. That's the democratization of game creation.

If you aren't much of a programmer I would recommend to use this. If you are a good programmer you could use Cocos2d, which doesn't have any GUI (only code).

Answer 3

Cocos2D. It was recently bought by Zygna who will ensure it gets the professional development it needs long into the future. And it's currently still open source.

+1 to anyone who recommends it.